Enemies Closer movie review & film summary (2014)
Van Damme plays Xander, a French-Canadian drug dealer who sneaks a bunch of narco-thugs dressed as Canadian Mounties across the border. They're here to reclaim a heroin shipment that sank to the bottom of a lake along with the plane that carried it. Xander bears no relation to any real-world drug dealer. He's a sadistic wraith in the vein of Martin Scorsese's Max Cady and Heath Ledger's Joker. He lectures his men about veganism and global footprints. His wavy orange slicked-back hair suggests Christopher Walken impersonating a troll doll. He knocks on the front door of a Drug Enforcement Agency border station with the nonchalance of Bugs Bunny asking to borrow a cup of sugar from Elmer Fudd and proceeds to kill everyone in the place. He's not above using guns but prefers not to, because barehanded murder is more of a challenge. (There's a marvelous early moment in which an especially tough DEA agent seems to be holding his own against Xander, and one of Xander's colleagues offers to help, only to be waved away.)
Van Damme's English is less intelligible than usual, and his line readings are sluggish in places. Improbably enough, this adds to the performance, perhaps because it sets the star apart from all the other actors who've opted to deliver their lines comprehensibly and with passion. At times his work here suggests the action star version of a late-period Marlon Brando performance, wherein the performer's evident inability to give a damn got folded into the character, making him seem more special than he might have otherwise.
There's a parallel story involving good guys who are at each other's throats, then have to team up and fight Xander's gang. One is the park ranger Henry (Tom Everett Scott), a former Navy diver who's haunted by his experience in Afghanistan. The other is Clay (Orlando Jones), a former soldier and ex-con who's come to Henry's remote island to avenge the death of his brother, who served under Henry during the war. Like everyone else who isn't named Jean-Claude Van Damme, Scott and Jones behave as if they're in a modest shoot 'em up that isn't winking at the audience. They play their roles earnestly and with flashes of wit (the best of these is Scott's imagined conversation with a rude old man who rebuffed his attempt to be neighborly). Their straightforward approach contrasts intriguingly with Van Damme's exhausted decadence and makes them seem confident and strong. Whether they're acting against him or fighting against him, they never seem overmatched.
